Konica C35 - Shooting my father's old camera

 Something you don’t know about me is that I got my start in photography when I was a kid with a cheap plastic point-and-shoot camera, a bright red Konica POP super, and it's been somewhere around 15 years since the last time I shot film and I was feeling the itch to get back to it. So I did.

 A couple of years ago my father dug out his old camera, a Konica C35, and gave it to me, as it hasn't been used in like 20 or 30 years, something like that. He got it in the 70s and brought it with him in his most exciting travels, Paris and New York, and used it to document his life time and time again.

 So I bought a couple rolls of film, Kodak color plus 200, the most basic film you can get, and started shooting. Too bad it took me more than a year to shoot 24 exposures, but eventually I managed to get through the roll get it developed. Then I had to scan it because, surprisingly, it costs way too much to digitalize pictures, it was way cheaper to just buy a scanner, a basic Epson 370, and scan at home. The results are, well, more or less what I expected.

 You know, I have a love-hate relationship with this camera. I love it because it's small, cute, compact and basically completely automatic, the only one thing you have to do is to set the focus. The problem is that the zone focusing is very limited, you can only set it to 1 meter, 1.5 meters, 3 meters and infinity and the viewfinder doesn't give you any visual cues, you never know if you are in focus or not and, as I feared, many of the pictures turned out to be completely out of focus. Some would argue that the proper way to shoot this camera would have been with a flash, because when you mount a flash on this camera you can set the aperture; the shutter speed is bound to the aperture so you cannot change the shutter speed in any ways, but if you mount an external flash you can set the aperture. So many times I found myself in situation where lighting was poor and the 38mm f2.8 fixed lens doesn't reallt let too much light on the film, plus, as said, I was using ISO 200 film, so the camera compensated with a very low shutter speed and the shaking turned out to be excessive in the final result or just, completely misfocused.

 As I said, it took me more than a year to shoot these 24 exposures because I wanted to shoot only meaningful things or projects, like the portraits that I usually do, but eventually I realized that, first of all, it was my first roll of film on this camera and I didn't know how it would turn out, and then I also realized that any moment is important, that these old film cameras were used to document simple moments of everyday life and extraordinary moments, like my father's trip to New York, so I did. I started shooting a little bit more in situations that were a little bit different, that were not projects, in a more, you know, home style use of the camera.

 Too bad, again, that many pictures turned out to be blurry or out of focus and I blame this both to the restrictive focus of the camera and, obviously, user error.

 Even with its flaws, I am happy that I have tried to use this camera and that I got back into film photography and now that I have found my workflow I'm gonna shoot more.

 As always, let me know your experience with this lens, if you have any question feel free to ask in the comments below and don’t forget to check the full video for all the samples.